06/15/2020
Parravani (Her) exposes motherhood’s serrated edges in this searing exploration of love, autonomy, and abortion. Forty-year-old Parravani was deeply in debt and unexpectedly pregnant with her third child in 2017, and her tenure-track position at a West Virginia college provided the family’s only stable income, but still fell short of covering the bills. Certain this pregnancy spelled the end of her career, Parravani wanted an abortion, to which her husband responded, “It’s your body.” But one local gynecologist refused her request, and another would only prescribe her RU 486 if she promised not to tell anyone else at the practice. “Reduced to a vessel, I was rage-filled,” she writes. Options elsewhere were too far away and expensive to be practical. “Every path seemed strung with a trip wire.” Throughout, Parravani elucidates the nation’s patchwork of abortion laws and data about women who seek to end their pregnancies, finding that states that restrict reproductive freedoms also have the poorest health outcomes for infants and children. From the point at which Parravani decides to carry her son to term, the book turns to building a devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed the two of her children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today. (Oct.)
"[Parravani] dissects the complexity of choice, how our own trauma and relationships inform it, as well as policy and access. She reveals the cost to us all when we fail to openly personalize the politics of abortion in America."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Achingly personal. . . . [Parravani reveals] the ways in which the American health care system denies women agency over their own bodies and their children's futures."
—Entertainment Weekly
"From the guts. Parravani takes her life in hand and confronts the institutions and attitudes that oppress her and countless women just like her. . . . Parravani's narrative is an American story. It doesn't just hit close to the bone; it reveals the skeleton."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Searing. . . . A devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed [Parravani’s] children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today.”
—Publishers Weekly
"[A] luminous, complex story . . . visceral, yet metaphoric . . A welcome addition to women's narratives. . . In a time when the wars waged on women’s sexual bodies are happening in multiple, intersecting ways, especially through individual organizations and agencies’ attempts to stop women from asking for or receiving what they are legally allowed to request, Parravani’s story is cautionary and a call to action; as personal as it is political."
—Library Journal
"What emerges is not simply a portrait of Parravani's difficult marriage, painful health issues and stressful financial burdens but a complex picture of the unsayable circumstances that shape one woman's relationship to her body, to her choice to have children or not and the cost of that decision. In saying the unsayable, Parravani is unflinching and brave."
—BookPage
"Intimate, affecting. . . . A candid, personal look at the political and cultural forces shaping women’s lives."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Unflinchingly honest, Christa Parravani lays bare the terrors, exhaustion and the great sacrifice of a parent trying to provide a healthy life for her family. An inspired memoir—and a reminder of the serious metal required of every ordinary woman."
—Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter and Stray
"Groundbreaking. . . . A fierce and essential explication of the many forces that constrain reproductive freedom. In a country riven by the need to reduce, to simplify, to ignore, Loved and Wanted challenges us to pay attention, to hold complexity, and to understand why we have to do better."
—Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back
"Christa Parravani is one of our great memoirists. Loved and Wanted is a breathtaking book of life and death. Parravani provides a firsthand account from the front lines of a woman's right to choose. This story is a classic tale of the mountains. A story of how people arrive and leave, struggle and stay, and how they grapple with their ghosts."
—Scott McClannahan, author of The Sarah Book and Crapalachia
"Heavily pregnant, with young children and an absent husband, living in an Appalachian hellscape featuring appalling medical care and white supremacist violence, Parravani writes, 'It occurred to me that I might die… as a woman dies, with child.' This book is a deceptively languid segment of the unending story of women forsaken by misogynistic cultures, religions, corporations, and governments. It is a book that accurately depicts—its brilliant metaphors glittering like diamonds—how much some Americans want women to suffer. Everyone should read this book."
—Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and Ongoing
"The power of Christa Parravani’s memoir almost eclipses the world of mere words. It is at once a lyrical meditation on motherhood, and a fierce examination of the double bind of pregnancy in a world in which women’s choices are bound, and increasingly threatened, by the moral definitions and feeble politics of men. I want everyone to read it, to see the ways in which she navigates what most of us are never courageous enough to say. The book burrowed into some secret place in me, a place where it will exist not for weeks, or months, or even years, but forever. In my life, I will never forget this book. Read it. This is all I can say. You must read it.”
—Rachel Louise Snyder, award-winning author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost is Nothing
“Here is searing testimony from the frontlines of American womanhood. Loved and Wanted is the story of one woman's fight to decide what's best for herself and her family. In gorgeous prose, this memoir simmers with anger at injustice and the fierce love of children. Parravani writes about the complexities of motherhood with warmth, dazzling imagery and a rogue sense of humor. Her heartbreaking and inspiring story—of seeking abortion and safe childbirth, caring for husband and kids—lays bare a broken system that denies fundamental human rights to women who can't afford to pay for them.”
—Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life
10/01/2020
Parravani (Her: A Memoir) begins her luminous, complex story with a memory—one that is visceral, yet metaphoric and sets the tone for this work, which proves a welcome addition to women's narratives with its willingness to address poverty, sexuality, spirituality, and the difficult choices women are forced to make when navigating oppressive systems. Parravani then moves from the childhood memory to the central narrative: an unplanned pregnancy at age 40 that she wanted to terminate but was unable to because of the ways in which health care and medical regulations in her home state deterred her until she ended up too far along into her pregnancy for an abortion to be an option. She eloquently tells of her marriage and raising two children on set incomes, along with the fears and worries of providing for an additional child. VERDICT In a time when the wars waged on women's sexual bodies are happening in multiple, intersecting ways, especially through individual organizations and agencies' attempts to stop women from asking for or receiving what they are legally allowed to request, Parravani's story is cautionary and a call to action; as personal as it is political.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI
2020-09-16
An unexpected pregnancy reveals a crisis in women's health care.
In an intimate, affecting follow-up to her well-received debut memoir, Her (2013), Parravani recounts the complicated circumstances surrounding the birth of her third child. At the age of 40, a year after her second daughter was born, the author discovered she was pregnant. The news was dismaying: Her marriage was foundering, her family was financially unstable, and with a full-time job as a creative writing teacher, she felt she could not manage another child. Soon, however, she found that access to an abortion was severely circumscribed. In Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had moved for her teaching job, she could not find a provider; by the time she found one, located hours away in Pittsburgh, her pregnancy was too far along. Parravani cites the Turnaway Study, which examined women’s motivations for seeking an abortion, and she echoes those findings: “Nobody goes to a clinic or a doctor and joyfully ends a pregnancy,” she writes. “Nobody wants an abortion. They do it because they’re broke, or alone, or need to care for the children they already have, or because they can’t or don’t want to raise a baby.” In West Virginia, lack of access to abortion was consistent with poor health care overall. The state has one of the nation’s highest infant and child mortality rates as well as the nation’s highest levels of drinking water contaminants and number of opioid deaths. When her youngest daughter needed to see a pediatric urologist, she found only one practitioner in a state with the highest risk of kidney and renal failure in the country. When her son was born jaundiced, with a broken clavicle and needing tongue-tie surgery, his needs were not addressed. But more than West Virginia’s medical shortcomings, Parravani focuses on women’s reproductive rights. “Choice,” she asserts, “bolsters the miraculous attachment we have to our babies.”
A candid, personal look at the political and cultural forces shaping women’s lives.
